Peace Sign Retro Cookie Designs with Royal Icing - How to make a spiral design on a cookie

Here's what I've been working on the past couple of days... I matched the colors off of a plate, a little bit unconventional but it works. When I finished I didn't get close ups of some of my lettering. The Kopykake really helps.

This cookie happened by accident, and was the last one I did so it is sloppy. I wish I would have done more of the peace signs this way. I love the look of the marbling of colors in this design.

Here is a tutorial of how I made the spiraled web design. When I made something similar last October I made the mistake of first covering the cookie with icing and then adding the swirls. As they dried the icing oozed off the cookie ruining the design.

I used royal icing that had been thinned with just a little bit of water until it was the consistancy of honey. When in doubt, stop adding water in order to get the icing right. It's better to go too thick than too thin. If it's too thick for decorating it is so easy to go back and add a few drops of water. It is much more difficult to thicken; however, this can be done by adding just a little bit of powdered sugar. I've found that I get little lumps when this happens. So when in doubt, stop adding water.

I added the aqua color first and left space for the next colors. Before you do this try to draw a picture of what you want so you know which order to add the colors and how many lines of each to add. If you just want to add one accent color, it is okay to first flood the background and then add the spiral on top, but when you are adding multiple colors don't flood the background.

Now add the second color - see how I started just past the blue line and tried to get as close to the blue as possible.
Adding the third color, again going just outside the orange.

Now adding the white, the cookie is almost completely covered in icing.

I have just added the last color, the black and will add just a few drops here and there to make sure it is completely covered. It's okay if there are small gaps because dragging the toothpick will help the icing to spread.

Now the fun part - drag a toothpick from the center out to make the web design. You can experiment with this and go all sorts of ways to get the look you want. This technique is great for making Christmas ornaments, candy cookies, spider webs, fireworks, etc. Clean the toothpick in-between each use so that you don't get blobs of brown in the center.

Now the cookie just needs to dry.

I love how each cookie looks a little different.

I ran out of orange icing and frustrated squeezed the orange on the cookie wherever. Then I layered with other colors. I love how the one on the left turned out. I really liked the one on the right the way it was because it reminded me of Spain. Maybe a tourist brochure I had seen once. I want to make a Dali replication on a cookie... just because.

Always Always mix dark colors in advanced to avoid that gross dye flavor. Here I am preparing the icing and will stop at this point even though the colors are not quite dark enough. You can only get around this when you are doing pastel colors. I've found that any dark colors, including orange, need time to develop.

Two days before decorating, mix the colors. I'm going to stop here. The burgandy color will get darker over the next few days, and the charcoal will turn black. You can always add a little bit right before you use the icing. In order to get the red color to match I added more tulip red and brown to get it to match the plate.